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 Editorials | Opinions | January 2008 
The High Price of Low-Cost Immigrant Labour
 Lloyd Brown-John - The Windsor Star
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 |  | Overwhelmingly, those admitted under the education/skills criteria - those who tend to settle in heavily populated urban areas - do not fulfill the need for lower-paid, unskilled workers. |  | | | |
Border towns have always been hosts to transients. People who drift in and drift out - crossing borders legally and illegally. Cities such as Windsor, for example, have served as staging areas for immigrants seeking entry - by whatever means - to the U.S.
My old neighbours in River Canard had been involved for years in the smuggling, initially of booze, but later immigrants into the U.S.
Entering America has been the dream of millions over the years to the extent that today illegal migrants from Mexico and Central America have become an issue for many Americans.
Illegal migrants within the U.S. have become a new underclass of workers serving not only individual Americans in a domestic capacity but American industry as a source of exploitable, workers.
The issue of illegal and legal migrants as low-cost labour is a major political issue in the U.S.
Ironically, in Canada, we recently experienced debate over alleged refugees, arriving from the U.S. to Canada's border communities. The notion that Mexicans, for example, would be seeking political refugee status in Canada is basically absurd. Mexico is a democracy and many Mexicans work in Canada in the agricultural field as legal, permitted term residents (albeit, permits have time limitations).
Indeed, in our neighbourhood, we have hundreds of chaps (with whom I practise my Spanish) who work in local greenhouses. In Leamington, Mexico's ever-helpful consul works with the host community and Mexican guest workers on a continuing basis.
So the question is, why would any citizen of Mexico or any other democratic country arrive in Canada and claim refugee status?
Well, part of the answer might be found in rumours of opportunity. Opportunity beckons in the form of economic well-being and material benefit. In 2006, about 250,000 people were legally admitted to Canada as "economic immigrants," people selected on the basis of a "points system" in which criteria such as education, advanced skills, age and demand are utilized.
Most economic immigrants settle in urban areas which probably explains why Canada's demography is changing and that rural and urban are no longer distinctions between agriculture and industry. Rather, rural and urban in today's Canada also approximates cultural differences. Thus, the diversity of urban cultures in cities such as Toronto and Montreal are not closely paralleled in small rural communities.
But there is another significant difference emerging in Canada; one for which we might not countenance a continuation.
The federal government has quietly changed criteria upon which the demand for immigrant labour is needed. Overwhelmingly, those admitted under the education/skills criteria - those who tend to settle in heavily populated urban areas - do not fulfill the need for lower-paid, unskilled workers.
Many Canadian employers need lower-paid workers. In Vancouver, for example, labourers working on a tunnel for an Olympics rail-link between the airport and downtown - most of whom were from Latin America - were paid wages as low as $3.56 an hour. Indoor marijuana growers in the old Formosa Brewery, just south of Barrie on Highway 400, had 15 persons of Philippine origin working and living essentially as slave labor in a massive pot growing enterprise.
Under the enhanced economic immigrant program, an immigrant's value included a Labour Market Opinion. In other words, an opinion on whether the prospective economic immigrants skills were needed in Canada.
Very unobtrusively, the feds have established teams of bureaucrats in Calgary, Vancouver and other major cities to assist employers in hiring low-skilled foreign workers. The LMO criteria have been scaled back to permit visas for offshore labour to be employed often as a recruitment tool of first choice rather than a last resort.
For example, after two Chinese workers died in the collapse of an oil storage tank in the tarsands area of northern Alberta and, after a second tank collapse, the contract with a Chinese contractor was cancelled. Thereafter, the 300 Chinese workers brought in to Canada and residing in a remote camp with neither health nor safety assurances were returned to China.
All of this change in criteria for employment in Canada took place without any reference to Parliament. The federal government just quietly changed the rules so that in Alberta, for example, in 2006 more than 60,000 permits were granted to admit low-paid and low-qualification immigrants into jobs in Alberta alone.
The federal government is aiding and abetting the emergence of a largely hidden underclass in Canada. We do need unskilled labour but, as a country which still retains some pride of purpose and dignity of human condition, do we need to encourage development of a class of people largely deprived of the basic rights to health, safety and a decent wage?
Are Canadians really prepared to support maltreatment of other humans under the pretext of low-cost labour in our country? Somehow, I hope our politicians have the courage to ask embarrassing questions.
LLoyd Brown-John is professor emeritus, public administration, at the University of Windsor. |
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